Chapter Seven
It was supposed to be an easy elopement. A quick trip to Marietta to stand before the judge, no muss and no fuss. That had been Kitty’s plan from the start.
Until Kitty’s sisters got wind of what was going on, that was exactly what was going to happen.
And the days of them listening to Kitty on any topic were over, apparently.
Because they cornered her after her dinner out with Finn and no matter how she tried to turn the conversation to the owners of the new restaurant or the exquisitely prepared food, they wouldn’t have it.
“Crowded Table sounds great,” Flannery said impatiently, from where she was sitting on the stairs—literally blocking Kitty from racing up to the safety of her attic.
Indy stood at the bottom of the stairs, which wasn’t actually better.
“But I think I speak for everyone who’s ever lived when I say that what we’re actually interested in is the Finn Patrick of it all. ”
“You know Finn Patrick,” Indy chimed in. “The guy you went on a date with and were seen cuddling up with on the street?”
It took every ounce of will Kitty had in her body not to get deeply cross with the both of them. Not to snap back, claim that she didn’t know what they were talking about.
Or be happy they didn’t know about that second kiss.
She had to remind herself, more than once, that this was exactly what she’d wanted.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she told them both flatly. “It’s a whirlwind. Who knows where it will end up.”
Which had not satisfied her sisters at all.
Maybe that was why, a week later, when she told them that she needed them to get lunch up and running because she might be late, they were suspicious.
“Why would you be late?” Flannery demanded at the Sunday scheduling meeting where Kitty had brought this up.
She frowned across the table at Kitty, the summer sun making her red braids seem like fire as light poured in the kitchen windows.
“I have an errand in Marietta,” Kitty replied, and she was quite pleased with how matter-of-fact she sounded. How collected and sure.
But Indy snorted. “Last time you couldn’t go to work was because you were going on a date. Is this another date? A morning date?”
“It’s a none of your business date,” Kitty retorted, automatically. Then she remembered that she was supposed to be playing a part of a besotted woman.
The trouble was, Kitty had no idea what a besotted woman would behave like.
She’d seen many a besotted woman on a movie screen and in television programs, but this was her life.
And every time she talked about anything even remotely connected to the Finn Patrick of it all, she felt that same shaky, trembling sensation sweep through her. It was disconcerting.
She hated it, if she was honest. Sometimes she thought it was her body’s way of warning her that she should absolutely not be doing this thing she was doing with Finn.
But then she would remember the way he’d kissed her on the porch. Or on the main road outside Crowded Table.
It wasn’t as if all those feelings went away, exactly. It was as if they settled in harder, but with a weight that somehow felt right. Or not bad, anyway.
Maybe what she meant was that it didn’t feel like a warning. It felt like whatever the opposite of warning might be.
“I don’t know how to talk about this,” she said abruptly, as her sisters continued to make a meal out of staring at each other and then staring at her, because they clearly wanted her to understand that they were having a whole host of conversations about her, right there in front of her.
And Kitty had never been one to let other people speak for her, had she? “Finn and I are eloping.”
She thought maybe her sisters would get excitable at this announcement. That they would screech, carry on. Maybe break things—who knew?
But instead, they both sat there on the bench across from her and tilted their heads—in the same direction, at the same angle—and regarded her with the same direct hazel eyes she had in her own head.
“Come again?” Indy asked, after a moment.
“Because it sounded as if you said you were eloping,” Flannery chimed in. “And you can’t possibly have said that, can you?”
“That’s what I said,” Kitty bit out. She held her hands in front of her and clenched her fingers together, a little too tightly.
“Kitty.” Indy laughed a little bit. “What are you talking about?”
“Haven’t you only been on one date?” Flannery demanded.
“You don’t understand,” Kitty said. She thought about what Finn had said before.
When he told her that people needed to wonder about what had happened between them.
She couldn’t decide if she should pick some fantasy story about the two of them that she could tell her sisters.
How they’d been sneaking around for months.
How passion had overwhelmed them. How she didn’t know how to go on another day without him, or whatever it was people said at moments like this.
Not the truth, which was that she’d propositioned him because she wanted to own the restaurant and the land, and now she thought about neither the restaurant nor the land. She mostly thought only about Finn.
As she sat there, feverishly trying to think up the perfect story that would appeal to her sisters most, she felt too much heat sweep over her body.
Maybe it was imagining sneaking around with Finn.
Maybe it was wondering what it would be like if they kissed a whole lot more than they had.
Maybe it had something to do with the way he had traced his thumb over her lips, and dragged it a little, and how was it that she could feel that as if he was doing it right now?
Somehow, as she sat there casting around for the right thing to say, she felt herself getting hotter and redder and she thought she might even have broken out into some kind of sweat.
And her sisters sat across from her, staring at her, their eyes widening by the second.
Kitty tried to clear her throat, but no matter how many times she ordered herself to just dive in. To forge forward. To just say something, for God’s sake, it didn’t work.
She couldn’t.
“Oh,” Indy said, eventually.
Kitty realized her hands were shaking as she lifted them up to press against her cheeks.
Flannery’s mouth had actually dropped open. “Wow,” she said, though whether in reply to Indy or just in general, Kitty couldn’t tell.
“Kitty,” Indy said after a moment, “have you ever—”
“I don’t really want to talk about this,” Kitty managed to say then. She pushed back from the table, but that was worse, because she wasn’t sure that she could stand. As if she had come down with some horrendous flu in the past three minutes, except she didn’t feel sick.
She didn’t feel sick at all.
“So we will be closing the restaurant,” Flannery said, matter-of-factly. “Because you will not be eloping alone, Kitty Bennett. Obviously. We’re the Bennett sisters. We don’t leave anyone behind.”
Kitty wasn’t sure how she escaped the rest of the conversation, or maybe it was just that she didn’t remember the rest of it, too busy being scandalized by her own body’s reaction.
She decided to text her book club best friends the elopement news, so she could control her reaction to their responses. Which came immediately.
And in the meantime, she marched herself down to Dr. Ramona’s clinic and climbed up the back stairs to knock on Finn’s door. She was determined to… settle this, or herself.
But when he opened the door and gazed down at her with all that impossible blue, plus that gleam in his eyes, she felt that same shuddering take over again. That and all the heat.
“I feel I need to warn you that my sisters have discovered our elopement, and insist upon showing up for us,” she told him. Stiffly.
She would tell her friends that it was a family thing. That would keep this nightmare from growing any bigger.
“Feeling more like a wedding than an elopement,” Finn said, but he didn’t sound angry about it. His big frame filled the doorway, but he stepped back. “You want to come in?”
Kitty did not. At all. She stared behind him into the cozy kitchen and shook her head. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely not,” he echoed. “That’s pretty definitive for someone who wants me to move in with her in a week’s time, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see how those two things relate,” Kitty said crossly. “I’m just letting you know.”
“It’s just as well,” Finn said. “I also told my siblings what was up, and they also want to come.”
“What did you tell them?” Kitty demanded. This kept snowballing. Next thing she knew she’d be surrounded by the entirety of Cowboy Point while going through with this. Would she have to have a crowded divorce too?
Finn’s mouth curved and there was something about that that seemed to sneak all the way through her, like it was coiling around and around her organs.
“Raleigh assumed that you were pregnant,” he told her, conversationally, like he was just passing the gossip along and it wasn’t about them.
“Helena had something to say, but is mostly convinced that we’ve been sneaking around.
Cat shares that conviction, Dallas seems to feel a little protective on your behalf, and Tennessee just laughed. So did Matilda.”
He leaned against the doorjamb, and there was something about a man who exuded the kind of authority that he did leaning all the time.
There was something discordant about it.
Or maybe that was just how she was interpreting it.
It just seemed like he was trying to pretend that he was relaxed when he wasn’t.
When his whole body said something else.
But she didn’t want to stand here parsing him.
“That’s not so bad, I guess,” she muttered.
“My mother gave me an intense lecture on making good choices,” Finn said, and there was something about his tone that made her think that it really had been a lecture, and not necessarily a kind one. “But then Jenny Lisle started talking about you.”